


sands entangled

by kurgaya



Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Daemons, Blood and Injury, Humiliation, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Pre-Movie(s), Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-23
Updated: 2017-03-23
Packaged: 2018-10-09 11:25:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,819
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10411089
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kurgaya/pseuds/kurgaya
Summary: Into a back-alley they corner him, red-hot blasters and rifles outnumbering Baze’s sole cannon. It is only one weapon against many, and with one arm hanging uselessly at his side, he doesn’t have a hope in hell of aiming accurately. The odds are against him - the Force is against him.Baze tightens his grip around the trigger. Agnès growls long and low.





	

**Author's Note:**

> I’m a star wars newbie and let’s all pretend that humans all across the galaxy have animals native to earth as their daemons for simplicity’s sake. Also I wrote daemons into this because wtf not lol I'm a sucker for daemon AUs.
> 
> (Also Agnès is like AN-YEZ rather than AG-NES :P)

 

 

Baze’s mark shoots him first. The bullet shreds through his flightsuit and shatters into his shoulder; his returning fire careens wide, his blaster cannon spitting a dozen molten rounds over the marketplace bustle. The people of the slums are well-used to the whirring crackle of rifle-fire and the exchange of bloodied I.O.U.s, thinking only of themselves as they duck for cover, splinters of wood and debris exploding into the street. Baze can seek a target and lodge a bullet through a brain, shoot a chest full of holes, and water impoverished grounds with the sweat and black, clotted mucus of nameless faces without batting an eyelash, but he cannot withhold a curse of pain - of his stupidity - as he lurches forward atop the roof, his own blood splattering his neck and face like scorching tar. Through clenched teeth and with eyes screwed shut, he hisses a breath, saliva and blood bubbling between his lips where he nearly tore off his tongue. Hunched over, Baze knows he cannot afford to linger - not before, and certainly not now, the sounds of the slums a wild, vengeful calamity of languages rising in fear. One of his braids sticks to his cheek as he shakes his head, urging the swell of nausea away. The leather drags against his skin, the edges frayed and worn from burgundy to brown like the sands of Jedha, the city crumbling into the desert, the ancient temple that ignited the night in flame.

His blaster cannon whirs as he readies it, heaving it up into the crook of his uninjured arm. Bolts of pain rip down his other, his shoulder swelling hot and stiff, torn bone and flesh locked beneath the tears of his flightsuit. Baze ignores it, struggling to his feet. Claws clink against stone behind him, Agnès’ colossal form stalking like the desolated shadow of NiJedha’s temple across the roof. Her eyes alert and canines bared, yellow fangs slicing into a muzzle of dirty brown, she hauls her hulking weight down from their vantage point and descends into the alley below. Baze follows with footsteps just as heavy, his body two tonnes of cannon, firearms, and mistakes, where her’s is muscle, bone, and fur. Both Baze and his daemon are built like rocks, like boulders, like _bears_ , and people scatter into alleys and shops as they barrel past.

Baze has long-since accustomed himself to working alone - to _being_  alone, his daemon his only company. With Chirrut, Baze can pretend for those blissful, liminal days tucked into the nooks of NiJedha, eating bread from the market baked fresh and yet still seasoned with sand, Agnès a perpetual bodyguard and Chirrut’s daemon a perpetual little _shit_ , that the credits he earns aren’t blood money, that he isn’t any worse than the Imperials that invade the peace of temples and massacres villages and towns. Without Chirrut, Baze is a dog with a barbed-wire collar, and Agnès is the dog with the shape of a bear.

Unlike Baze, his mark is not working alone.

(Not that Baze’s contractor had shared this detail).

Into a back-alley they corner him, red-hot blasters and rifles outnumbering Baze’s sole cannon. Their relative destruction is debatable; Baze’s weapon may be a junkyard welded together, a contraption of metal and wires with an impractical design, but it reloads with the flick of a switch and destroys like nothing else he has wielded before. It is only one weapon against many, however, and with one arm hanging uselessly at his side, he doesn’t have a hope in hell of aiming accurately. The odds are against him - the Force is against him.

Baze tightens his grip around the trigger. Agnès growls long and low.

Their assailants laugh and spit in Baze’s face, wolves and hyenas cackling as they wrestle Agnès to the ground. Agnès does not yeild easily, fangs ripping flesh and fur as they try to restrain her, guttural sounds spitting back at the other daemons as her muzzle soaks with blood. They lose - Baze and Agnès, just as they expect the Force to will - but they do not lose their lives. Instead, Baze is lead hands bound, weaponless, and beaten to the brink of unconsciousness into the depths of the city. They muzzle and bind Agnès too, dragging her across the gravel like an animal, like a carcass, their laughter only rising with manic notes as she whines and thrashes about.

Baze curses in Standard and earns a flog from a rifle for his stupidity, the barrel _cracking_  across his face and bruising a purple welt into his jaw. Agnès says nothing, but then she has always said very little; even to him, as a child, when she hid between his legs as a pup. The other initiates at the temple viewed her with reservation, thinking her abnormal, calling them _weird_  - save Chirrut, who has never had anything except companionship and love to offer the bedraggled street-rat and the silent daemon at his side.

Thinking of Chirrut has Baze’s stomach twisting in guilt. This was supposed to be a simple job - in and out, and hardly worth the pay. If the credits had amounted to more, than perhaps Baze would have been sceptical of the alleged simplicity of the task, but a few measly credits for the life of a measly man had seemed a legitimate deal. Baze’s mark certainly wouldn’t agree, but then Baze’s mark isn’t the one with a bullet through his shoulder.

The never-ending depths of the slums close in around them, the walls squeezing together into passageways that have never felt the sun. The darkness down here is perpetual, a smog of toxins and waste and long-forgotten cries for help, twisted languages and dialects that deal in secret. Baze’s ribs clatter with every breath, each inhalation a gasp and each exhalation a wheeze of pain, blood dripping from his lips, down his chin, and trickling under the high neck of his flightsuit. His shoulder throbs and his fingertips are beginning to tingle. Baze dreads to imagine Chirrut’s expression when his husband returns with a non-functional arm and a face more un-kissable still, but it is the thought of Chirrut alone and waiting in the rubble they call home that has Baze lifting a head of defiance in the face of his captors’ taunts.

They want information on his contractor. Baze considers his busted arm, his stolen blaster, the dagger at his throat and Chirrut, Chirrut most of all, and tells them everything he knows.

His contractor can go die in a ditch for all Baze cares.

He knows little - not a name, but a face, and a last known location. He reproduces the accent, guesses the language, and describes what few details he saw of a humanoid shape. He recounts his job - null and void - and ignores the cackles in response. They beat him for the fun of it, lording over their triumph of a lone, nearly middle-aged man. Baze accepts every strike as a failure but refuses to shrink away from the familiar touch. Only Chirrut touches him kindly - only Chirrut touches him at all, these days, which Baze prefers over the violence of his pre-temple youth, a life lived in alleyways by the skin of his teeth and the break of his knuckles into bone.

His captors demand more, but Baze has nothing to give. They make true of their threats with their fists and their knives, slicing open his flightsuit and his layers of clothes. Agnès snarls behind her muzzle when the other daemons round on her too, and when two of their captors grow bored with the predictability of Baze’s body, bruising yellow and purple and bleeding red on demand, they hurl curses at Agnès as they approach her instead. Baze _lurches_  against his bindings when the first rifle prods against her flank, but this only serves to entertain the slumdogs that surround him; they elbow each other, yell dares, exchange slaps, and when one reaches down to snatch Agnès by the scruff of her neck, Baze sinks his teeth into somebody’s arm.

They fist their hands into his hair too, driving crooked, disease-bitten fingers through his knots and braids, and yank his head back to at his bloodied, wolfish growl. They kick Agnès for good measure and laugh at she howls. One of them rips the leather from Baze’s braids and discards it to dirt, and with the support of his gang cheering him on, hyenas laughing, men heckling, and the anonymous dark of the slums protecting their ways, he hacks at Baze’s hair until he is shaved to the crown.

“The dog too,” they urge, shoving Baze’s bloody face to the ground. They laugh at his ears as dozens have laughed before. “Could make good use of the bitch’s fur!”

Sirens wail. The warning shatters the gang’s confidence, silencing their taunts, and they scramble over themselves as the clunk-grinding of a law-enforcer droid approaches with the full weight of its weaponry. For a terrible moment, Baze is deaf but to the pounding of his heart in his ears - then Agnès whines, paws scrabbling into the earth, and her muzzle crashes once, twice, three times into the ground as she tries to shake it off. Hands still bound, Baze struggles onto his knees. Clumps of his hair lie strewn in bloody patches about him, and he vomits saliva and mucus as he stands. Mercifully, he remains conscious, so he carves through his bindings with an abandoned knife, and then carves through Agnès’ just as the droid clanks into the alleyway with its eyes a glowing, red blur through the gloom.

Agnès does not hesitate before sinking her teeth into its neck. It collapses into a heap of twitching metal and sparks, and Baze spares a thought for his custom-made blaster cannon before hobbling away from the scene.

 

 

 

Four days later than anticipated, Baze returns to the ever-changing sands of Jedha. Carved from desert, a lone stone mountain battered by the wind and the sand, the city of NiJedha has changed naught in Baze’s brief absence. This is not to say that the city has never changed, that its inhabitants have not faced hardship, massacre, and the Imperial presence that prowls the galaxy. The people within the walls of the city come and go, their fortunes rise and fall, but the stone and mortar of the streets, the buildings, and their livelihoods stand eternal.

The temple stands still, even if its halls were incinerated and its holy teachings cremated into ashes and blood many years ago.

Baze draws his cloak tighter about him, pulling the hood down over his face - his ears and his shaggy, slapdash hair. With Agnès plodding behind him, there is no hiding his identity. Everybody who’s anybody recognises Baze’s humongous dog daemon, and Baze knows that word of his arrival has spread deep into the streets before he even passes the eastern gate.

Humiliation urges Baze to drag his feet. He treks the long route home - the _very_  long route, looping it twice before he has mustered even half the courage necessary to face Chirrut - and hesitates at the door still, palm pressed against the moth-bitten wood, staring at his cracked knuckles instead of using them to knock.

Agnès nudges her snout against the door, ears flopped against her skull. Baze lowers his hand - his only hand, at the moment, the other immobile within a sling - and scratches between her ears. She rumbles a pleasant sound at the affection, allowing his touch as he allows no-one else’s, and the Jedhan wind must carry the noise far into the little two-room crevice that they call _home_ , for the door clanks open unbidden, Chirrut’s little daemon shoving her head through the gap.

Balanced on the door-handle and twitching in her hyperactive, ever-vigilant state, the white-bellied weasel blinks her beady eyes at Baze and Agnès before muttering, “Oh _no_.”

“Lin,” Baze breathes, beginning to say - _what_ , he doesn’t know, unable to find the words to articulate _anything_  worth saying in that moment, not an apology or an explanation or even a relieved, _well are you going to let me in_? Instead, his teeth grind together with a _click_  of his jaw, and he almost bites through his tongue for a second time that week as Chirrut swings the door open further, blind, opal eyes glowering at Baze just as easily as Lin had before.

“You smell delightful,” Chirrut deadpans, holding out a hand for Lin to scamper onto. “Your injuries must be worse than we envisioned.” The weasel darts up his arm and settles into the crook between his shoulder and neck, and Agnès flattens herself further into the ground as Lin whispers into Chirrut’s ear.

Baze would become one with the sands too, if he could.

“I see,” Chirrut says next, and the fact that his mouth does not quirk into the smile that frustrates Baze just so speaks _volumes_  of his mood. Opposite him, Baze shifts his weight from one bruised leg to the other, hoping against hope that Chirrut is unaware of his pain.

“Should I hope that _the other guy_  came off worse?” Chirrut asks, stepping back to allow Baze and Agnès past.

Baze shrugs himself inside, dismayed to feel his shoulders remain tight despite the familiar sight of their home taking shape about him. “They didn’t,” he grumbles, unwilling to share the details. Given half the chance, Chirrut will infer Baze’s spectacular failure from an inspection of his cuts and bruises - and knowing Chirrut, this will occur before the day’s end, before Baze has found the rest of his courage to admit that he almost hadn’t come home.

(Not merely because he had almost died - but because he cannot bear the humiliation of his hair sheared to his ears, almost as short as it was during his years as an initiate and Guardian-to-be, a life and a faith that Baze cast away long ago).

Chirrut does not sigh, but the way he moves slowly about the room almost _feels_  like a sigh as he lights the space for Baze’s tired eyes. “No, I gathered not,” he says, not quite looking in Baze’s direction. He folds his arms before him and adopts a pensive silence for a moment - a moment that Baze allows him to have, grateful for the quiet as Agnès pads across the room and flops into the corner beside their bed. She huffs a pained sound as she settles and Lin jerks towards it; Chirrut doesn’t, still watching his husband with perceptive, sightless eyes.

“They took your blaster cannon,” Chirrut says.

“Yes,” Baze replies, but Chirrut has never cared much for that cannon, so he doesn’t think that’s what they’re talking about - not when Baze’s braids don’t swing about his ears, the soft slaps of his hair shifting across his shoulders.

Chirrut nods and busies himself by the shelf where they keep their medicines. “Sit,” he orders, gathering their dwindling supply of bacta patches and a pair of scissors. “And take that cloak off, my love. You hide nothing that I have not seen before.”

This time, he does smile at the joke, and Baze finally feels that weight recede. He does as instructed, settling the cloak and what remains of his provisions aside, and then eases himself down onto their bed, bones creaking and wounds weeping all the while. His attempt at bandaging himself was sloppy, but it had kept him alive for longer than he had expected to live.

Agnès shuffles over, curling her shaggy head in his lap. Baze strokes where their assailants had grabbed her, and his daemon shivers at the contact as though their touch has branded her there.

Chirrut settles at Baze’s side, mindful of Agnès' enormous form. Usually, he touches Agnès without reservation, bestowing just as much love and affection upon her as he bestows upon Baze, but now he keeps his distance, going so far as to hesitate before Baze.

Gratitude swells inside Baze’s chest, prompting him to speak first. “You can touch us,” he permits, brushing his fingers against his husband’s knee. “My left arm’s in a sling.”

Chirrut smiles despite this grisly news, shifting a little closer to Agnès. “May I touch your hair?”

Baze grunts but tilts his head at the beckon of Chirrut’s hands. He doesn’t startle as his husband’s warm fingertips cup his face and trace his ears, but it’s a close thing. “What’s left of it,” he grumbles, sinking into the touch of Chirrut’s thumb across his cheek, the stroke of fingers through his asymmetrical hair.

Chirrut only continues to smile. “It will grow back,” he reassures, dotting Baze’s nose with a kiss. “And you will be just as dashing as before.”

“ _Hey_ ,” Baze rumbles, scowling at that thinly veiled insult. Lin snickers at Chirrut’s shoulder, and even Agnès woofs a laugh.

Chirrut merely kisses him again, loving him into a peaceful lull.

 

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading!


End file.
